[Freedombox-discuss] [gnu-prog-discuss] MediaGoblin, now an official GNU project :)

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

Hey Luke,

On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 1:19 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <
luke.leighton at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>  btw i can't tell if ostatus has built-in firewall-busting (like the
> gnunet infrastructure does).  one of the key reasons why all of these
> "federation" projects (e.g. sipwitch) are technically unsuccessful is
> because they don't have proper firewall-busting built-in.
>

I strongly agree that assuming everyone has a public, unfiltered IP address
is a huge mistake if people want to aim for mass adoption and provide
realistic alternatives to the stuff "in the cloud".

  gnunet is the only free software infrastructure that we have that has
> been designed - somewhat accidentally - to deal with this.
>

This isn't exactly true - so please forgive me for jumping in and promoting
my own project now... :-)

Although the implementation is completely different, PageKite (
http://pagekite.org/) is designed to solve exactly this problem - to let
people run publicly visible servers on machines that do not have unfiltered
and/or public IP addresses. It's free software (AGPLv3) with the backing of
my tiny startup company in Iceland. (After a chat with RMS we are
considering whether we should make it an official GNU project as well, but
haven't really come to a conclusion yet.)

Instead of attempting to provide strong anonymity like GNUnet, I2P and Tor,
PageKite's goal is to be backwards compatible with today's browsers and
today's servers, letting people use the tools and standards they are already
familiar with.  (If people want backwards compatibility and strong anonymity
at the same time, it is possible to use Tor and PageKite together, at the
cost of performance.)

In my opinion, if you want people to gradually migrate to more privacy
friendly alternatives than Facebook and Google, then this backwards
compatibility is critical - I can't demand that everyone who wants to visit
my photo albums install a GNU VPN client or an IPv6 tunnel; my photo album
has to work with the web browser and Internet connection they have already.

I gave a talk about PageKite at RMLL this summer, and just got the slides
and video up and running last week: http://pagekite.net/slides/rmll2011/

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
Founder, lead developer of PageKite.

Make localhost servers visible to the world: http://pagekite.net/
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